St. Urbain's Horseman (5 page)

“I was only looking for my Aunt Ettie,” Duddy whined, retreating.

The saleslady snatched Duddy by the arm. “I'm going to get the manager and have you sent to reform school for life. Filthy things.”

“Aunt Ettie,” Duddy hollered.

“Oh, let him go,” the girl said.

Duddy stepped on the saleslady's foot and they were off, scooting between shoppers, and flying down the escalator. Outside, Duddy said, “Did you see her bazooms, butt? What a handful!”

“A lot of good it did you.”

“Shmeck!
Let him go, that's what she
said
, but did you see where she was
looking?
Right at my bone. One more minute and I would have had her up against the wall.”

They found some butts, lit up, and climbed Mount Royal in search of couples in the bushes. “Everybody's doin' it, doin' it,” Duddy sang, “pickin' their nose and chewin' it, chewin' it.” He told Jake that once he discovered a couple stuck together, just like dogs, and had to summon the St. John's Ambulance man to get a kettle of boiling water to break them apart. Jake didn't believe him.
But there, your lordship, you have a scene from my early sex life
. How Hersh was first led astray, he thought, feeling better, much better.

Jake reached into his dressing gown pocket for a cigarillo, but came up with the most urgent of the morning mail instead. The letter from the tax inspector. The Grand Inquisitor, bless him, was keen to meet with Jake and his accountant for further epiphanies.

If only he had listened to Luke.

“I happen to know of at least three of Hoffman's clients who are being reassessed. If I were you, Jake, I'd move elsewhere.”

“I'm scared to. He knows too much about me.”

It was the sapient Oscar Hoffman who had first incorporated him, with a capital of one hundred pounds and three directors. Jake had come to him with a tangled and confused carton of accounts, receipts, and statements from his agent, which a bony little man, a bantam with steel-rimmed glasses, had gathered together, his smile servile, retreating from Hoffman's office as unobtrusively as he had entered. Then Hoffman had told Jake that from this day forward he would draw a salary of five thousand pounds from his company,
P.A.Y.E being deducted at source. A further ten thousand pounds could be left in company accounts, for outgoings, as it were, and there would be no need for more inventive measures to be taken until such time as Jake's earnings burgeoned, as they certainly would, Hoffman assured him, beaming.

But at the end of the first year in the troubled life of Jacob Hersh Productions, Hoffman pondered the balance sheets and was displeased. “My goodness! Five thousand pounds in withdrawals!”

“Yes. I'm afraid so.”

“Surely, you invested some of this in screen properties.” Here he paused to peer at Jake. “Paying cash, you understand.”

“Yes. Sure I did.”

Which earned him a benevolent smile.

“And on your trip to Canada in February you hired a writer, I suppose. Took options on this and that. Kept a secretary, paying her in cash.”

“Damn right I did.”

“And here I see you were in Paris … 1959 … The George V, from the twelfth of April to the fifteenth …”

Nancy in a light blue Givenchy negligée with white lace cuffs and a high collar, tied in a bow around her neck, seated by the dressing table, head inclined, combing out her long black hair.

“… was that not to meet with a producer, which would have made the trip deductible?”

Producer of my first-born son.

“Yes.”

“Good. Very good, Mr. Hersh. Now you take these accounts home again and try to recall any other business trips, properties and options paid form cash, and so forth and so on.”

In his attic aerie, Jake opened the Horseman's cupboard and removed the journal. The entry on the first page read, “The Horseman: Born Joseph Hersh in a miner's shanty in Yellowknife, Yukon Territories.
Winter. Exact date unknown.” Following, there was a list of Joey's aliases. Jake flipped to another section, still sadly incomplete.

There was a cross-reference to Fitzgerald, F. Scott,
The Last Tycoon
. Monroe Stahr “guessed that the Jews had taken over the worship of horses as a symbol – for years it had been the Cossacks mounted and the Jews afoot. Now the Jews had the horses …”

Another entry, this one penciled in, read:

The Horseman. Right now, Jake thought, maybe this very minute, he is out riding somewhere. Over the olive-green hills of the Upper Galilee or maybe in Mexico again. Or Catalonia. But, most likely, Paraguay.

“All right, then,” Uncle Abe had said, seething. “Chew on this, Jake. From what I know of your cousin, if he is actually searching for Mengele, which I don't believe for a minute, if he is hunting this
Nazi down and finds him,” Uncle Abe had shouted, pounding the table, “he won't kill him, he'll blackmail him.”

No, Jake thought, shutting out the obtruding voice, Uncle Abe was only trying to justify his own chicanery,
no, no
, and Jake imagined the avenging Horseman seeking out the villa with the barred windows off an unmarked road in the jungle, between Puerto San Vincente and the border fortress of Carlos Antonio López, on the Paraná River.

Joey, Joey.

In his mind's eye, Jake saw him cantering on a magnificent Pleven stallion. Galloping, thundering. Planning fresh campaigns, more daring maneuvers.

S
HE CONTINUED:

“So I says to the fella, what do you think, I've never flown before, I don't know how
other
airlines do things? You're talking to a world traveler, a jet-setter yet. He doesn't even crack a smile, I tell you it takes all kinds. With Air Canada I says if you had to wait two hours for the take-off there would be sandwiches,
individually wrapped
. (We have this Saran Wrap now, I don't know if you get it here, I'll send you some, you can't do without it. Honestly, doll, what they can do nowadays, it's remarkable, who has to slave over a hot stove any more like I did?) With Air Canada I says to him, we wouldn't be treated like cattle, we would be served tea. Well, you should have seen him jump.
Yes, madame. Certainly, madame
. Good for you, the Indian lady says when I sit down again. Who even knew she could speak English, we'd been sitting side by side for an hour maybe? So I says I hope you don't mind me asking, but why is it you people paints dots on your forehead? Forgive me, I'm not the nosy type, but if you don't ask you never find out, isn't that so? Is it a Christian symbol, I says? No, she says, in India they're Hindu. You know, like the Beatles. And the dot means she's married. Oh, isn't that fascinating, I says. Now I've learned something. So we get to talking and she tells me that in India, you know, there is respect for the mother. Such respect. Her mother is a widow, she says, and they all live in one house, her family, her brother's family, her
younger sister's family, all in one house, and the mother, well, the mother is the head of the family and everybody respects her, it's a time-honored Indian custom. Now isn't that interesting?”

Mrs. Hersh and Nancy reached the top of the stairs, Jake flitted into the bedroom, unseen he hoped.

Heh-heh-heh.

The bedroom door opened. Oh God, no, Jake thought. But it was Nancy.
“Ketzelle,”
she squealed, “nipple-biter, so there you are!”

Jake giggled.

“Let me come to court today.”

“Absolutely no.”

“Jake,” she began tentatively, “there's something I've been meaning to ask you …?”

“Harrod's?” he countered, grinning.

“Yes.”

The handsomely appointed oak and marble toilets adjoining the men's hairdressing salon.

“They can't bring it up. It never made the charge sheet, duckie.”

“And what about your friend Sergeant Hoare?”

“I no longer think it's bad luck that Hoare's involved. He's a surprisingly sympathetic type, really, and he's not holding a grudge.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because we joked about it.”

“Oh, you are such an innocent, Jake!”

Then, just as he was about to embrace her, Mrs. Hersh was with them. Immediately Jake stiffened.

“Good luck in court today.”

“It's Harry who's going to need the luck today.”

“May he rot in hell.”

“He's my friend, Maw. We are in this together. Comrades. Look at it this way, me and Harry, we're saints in the new order of things.
Lamed vovs
. Like Jean Genet. You explain that to her, Nancy.” And slamming the door, he was gone.

Mrs. Hersh sunk to the bed. “You don't know what it is to be a mother. What an agony …”

“I have children too, Mrs. Hersh. And if he goes to prison –”

“You mustn't even think that.”

“But I have to think that.”

“I wouldn't go home, you know. I'd stay right here and stick by you for as long as I was needed. I'd stay, you can count on it. You married into a Jewish family, doll, and we stick together, you know. In a crisis we always stick together.” Mrs. Hersh lowered her eyes and smoothed out her pajamas. “Many outstanding sociologists have observed that.”

Nancy retrieved Jake's brown cashmere jacket from the floor and slid open the door to his built-in cupboard. Too late, she realized that Mrs. Hersh had come up softly behind her to peer inside.

“What is
that?”
Mrs. Hersh asked.

“Nothing,” Nancy said, flushing.

“Nothing.
Some
nothing.”

The military kit, including a rifle with a long-range sight, was stacked in a corner. With the body-building equipment.

“Oh, that,” Nancy said, simulating laughter, “that's not Jake's. It's a friend's – yes, an actor's – he left it here.”

“But the lying little bitch, I know she's a whore, yesterday in court didn't her lawyer say –”

“It's an actor's.”

“Oh, an actor's. You mean it's for a play?”

“Yes,” Nancy said. Emphatically yes. And glancing out of the window she caught Jake edging cautiously toward the terrace, where the baby, unsuspecting, was playing in his pram.

Smiling down at his five-month-old son, Jake extended his right arm surreptitiously and then flicked his fingers. No reaction. Shit, he thought, a clear case of
LOCOMOTOR ATAXIA
(also called Tabes Dorsalis or Posterior Spinal Sclerosis), a disease of the nervous system, manifested principally by disordered movements of the limbs in walking. Among the earlier symptoms are disorders of vision.

Perplexed, Jake brought his hand in closer, flicking his fingers again. Fiercely. The baby, who had been gurgling happily, frowned. His frown, Nancy witnessed from the window above, was just as severe as Jake's, and, unaccountably, her eyes filled with tears.

“Will you please stop tormenting the baby,” Nancy called out.

“I'm playing with my son.”

“I saw you. Now lay off, Jake.”

Banging the window shut Nancy all but collided with Mrs. Hersh behind her. A hand held to her cheek, her eyes stricken, Mrs. Hersh asked, “Is he cruel to the baby?”

“Oh, it's nothing, Mrs. Hersh.”

Sammy, still in his pajamas, slid into the bedroom – braking –
Topper
comics clutched in one hand. “What begins with an ‘E' and has only one letter in it?” he asked.

“You hear,” Mrs. Hersh said, her eyes filled with reverence, “at his age.”

“Oh, Sammy, please. You must get dressed. You'll be late for school.”

“There's a trick in it,” Sammy said.

“A trick in it, you hear?”

“What begins with an ‘E' and has –”

“I don't know.”

“She doesn't know. Me too.”

“Give up?”

“Yes, doll.”

“An envelope.”

“An envelope!” Mrs. Hersh clapped her hands, she hugged Sammy. “Delicious one,” she said.

Nancy retreated around the other side of the bed to her bathroom but Mrs. Hersh followed her, scanning the glass shelves, sucking in every detail avidly, finally lifting a bottle of Arpège. “Such a big bottle of perfume.”

“It's cologne.”

Mrs. Hersh shrugged, lowering her eyes. Everything I do is wrong. Her gaze fell on the bidet; quickly, she averted her eyes.

To her way of looking, Nancy knew, the bidet was some sort of sinister gentile contrivance. For the orgies. “I'm going to wash now,” Nancy said evenly. “Would you excuse me?”

“I'll get Sammy ready for school. It's my pleasure.”

While he was waiting in the study for the black Humber with his solicitor Ormsby-Fletcher to come and pick him up, Jake flicked open the rest of the morning mail, hoping for a token of concern from Luke. Nothing. The first letter he opened was written on a round piece of stationery.